Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  That one without a hat understands American, said Mr Simpson, eyes swole in the magnifying glasses.

  But that Indian wont hear a thing. This isnt Indian business.

  Then he told a long weirded thing such as I cant hope to repeat only relying on my memory with my simular attempt.

  He says all the girl children is drawn to Missus Skatt and sneaks over to her they cant help it, when theyr ten or like that. This was even before the founding of the Ozarks with another woman. Why even right then a girl was hauling wood to her cause she knewn it was cold and she was near out of fuel. All around the girls and the womens learnt at her knee these things: how to pleasure a man so good hed cry for it, how to coy on him, how to get inside him like a mindful tapeworm, because she anointed them with special powerful sexual parts and strong soft arms and eary soothing voices. She coached them when to begin apleading for all they want within the county because they could never go outside the county ever and their men couldnt neither. And how to nag and harangue and beat down and whup their men not raising a little finger, and how to make him worm small and stuck to his spot. You take mind, the Yarp said, that this county aint forever had nothing but tired sorry men droven down like a stake to their patches. They never went off to fight a war even when the whole world needed them to fight evil. Nor none of them was athletes nor only feckless at lumbering or even executing in a automobile. And none ventured out or away and couldnt hardly catch a fish on a spring day with trouts leaping on the bank. Nor with cow nor horse nor goat (the Yarp kicked the goat and Mr Simpson and Gene James seen them whitish baby shoes of a sudden) any count. That they died not only before theyr womens but passed over like sissies mewling and pouting ten years afore they ever hit dirt. You notice how they are coming down level and under the Indians. The Yarp pointed over at the back of that Indian who was playing and sudden he began playing something ghostly like what were wrote by a man with a long beard in a Asian castle and sung by his beautiful daughter.

  You notice too the crimes of murder and theft in the nights, all them I tell you now by her womens and girls. Not found by sheriffs nor nobody because the innocence is what she drilled in to them. Right now she is teaching that little wood-hauling girl how to be innocent and quick and steal, you bet. Its a thieves university, the womens, yes your wives too and your children-seeming girls has done it with bloody hand and prestidigitation of the fingers, theyr off with stolen goods, what theyr men dont get them. And sometimes they drop things like the watch Roonswent Dover found. He turned around and his eyes was yellow on me. I couldn’t look and down at his knees I see them thin chickeny legs cutting out under his black pants. I just gulped and he was around, said Now this! and he pushed himself right up to Gene James, pulled his coat out.

  Old man James took a gander and begun vomiting and then he fell off his chair dead with a whitened head. I was holding my hand over my eyes and didnt know what he was after for a long second. Mr Simpson hed seen but he survived and got up and yelled to them Indians for help but they never even turnt around.

  Yes her time has come. Its over for her now. One last night of pleasure and it will be done. This Im getting xactly I think.

  You wont tell none of it Simpson because theyll think youve passed to senile and take away your store.

  He turned to me. I was ten feet off. The pet goat was nuzzling my legs for comfort and baaing.

  And if you tell anybody this you will die, Roonswent. You are going to know whats wrong around here but you cant do nothing about it and that is your eternal curse, which is like that of many a man. But I wont have to worry. Youre of the age where a woman has already touched you and touched you deeply. You think you are being so kind to your mommer taking her a fixed sewing machine but when she takes it you look deep like you’ve never looked, youll see what is there.

  So Im up the hills and mounts, so give me this.

  He took a fold-in plastic fishing pole off the wall. It made a stout cane. He went toward the door, red spots on the floor off his infant shoes.

  Theyll be out tonight, but just your littler girls. Even I have to swat them off. Youd think not, but I tell you, even Ive been womaned. I aint half the Yarp (he said it!) I used to be.

  Therell be a time when the Indians will get the courage too gainst us old white bones. The Yarp went out in the cold snow and turned toward the mountains wed left. But he didnt take all his smell.

  Mr Simpson looked horrible miserable.

  What did he show you? I asked him.

  Miz Skatt’s head in his belly, cooking and hollering.

  Later in the week me and two, Deacon Quarles and Chief Nini, clambered up the hill and went in the house. There was just, you couldn’t believe it, piles of jewelry, watches, radios, knives and ribbons, deputies badges and wigs. Missus Skatt were in her bedroom with a old head and a young body, all laid out nude and peaceful.

  So I havent said it, Ive written it and I hope this might make a difference. But I think it wont, not at all. Im got, Im doomed.

  But its done for Deacon Charles and he says he will send it on to the governor. That makes me even or better than Deacon Charles, remember.

  Mother Mouth

  TODAY, VERNON, I NOTICED ELVIS WAS GETTING HAIRY. FINDING THAT, my tongue got hot all the way down to my heart to which it was attached. There was no keeping off the temperature or the rump rump noise of my want in my person. We don’t go to church hardly anymore except to learn good English. Their music ain’t ourn. Ourselves, we suck the air out the radio when it plays the Memphis beam with Negroes, shouts, moans and rumps in it. Between ourselves we conceive a sound like a worried panther having lots of mama and baby words. It can’t be in a church. We take the airwaves out of our little Philco and spit them back with the mama panther in them. The Philco is all we could afford after you wrote the extra zero on that check and left us for three years in jail.

  From now on you are such a disgrace, you understand, that you have absolutely no sway in anything and will only hang in the back or at the rear side to us in disrespect. I, with my dark inset eyes, him and his rustling eyes, we have made a vow, Elvis and I: that we will remain slim and elegant and catlike in our movements until the day he has captured his child bride, who will dye her hair jet black like mine. Then I, then he, will get fat together in blurring of each other toward the end, and we have impacted ourselves so. We like pills when we can get them but our beauty we know can’t never last, that’s a part of the glory. We can’t be forty years old. Romance don’t really allow forty years of life to what we are. Oh, we might go on as something, some shape or mass, but we’re not even there anymore, it’s burnt up, panther and all.

  He will sing about the Teddy Bear, how he wants to be it, and millions of little ears will hear something like never they heard before, down to their feet, and wealth untold will unfold. Every song will be about me, it won’t be no real girl, and that is what they will hear and gasp upon and find so magic all to their toes. In pictures you will see him with women, all kinds of gorgeous girls and cute like what ignored him when he was poor and baby-pretty, but you will never ever see love in Elvis’s eye for any of them, because it will only be me, and our music together. He’ll be looking away like into a mirror all his life but it’s me he’s looking at. You won’t be able to imagine Elvis ever looking directly at anybody, it will always be off to the side at guess who, the mirror maybe? but more me.

  Then I will die and the source will dry up for him. The famous will visit him at some mansion right on Memphis’s Main Street, and he will tell these people, in maybe English, “Mama ain’t out there no more feeding them chickens in the back.” The tears and the crack in his voice will always be there from then on, Vernon—jail trash, you’ll be back venaling around like a rodent with an evangelist hairdo, but the money will be bad, Vernon, always bad, like that extra zero you wrote on that check—and my boy will get coiled and wrapped and weird inside and out, leaping in flight wild with Tupelo space clothes on him, doing movements
that are trying to climb the ladder to heaven where his mama is, and the music gift will still be there, only there ain’t nothing worthy to sing no more, and he is making those thrown-out grabbing postures and sweating like with my fluid all over him, becoming a mass, just a groping mass, on the rope—up, up, me waiting for him.

  Because there ain’t anything like Mama Nooky. Ask all them soldiers that lay dying on the fields of that great war you weren’t in.

  Rat-Faced Auntie

  EDGAR PLAYED THE TROMBONE AND FOR EIGHT YEARS HE WAS A MOST requested boy. Based in Chicago, he did a lot of studio work and homed in the fine, lusty Peets Lambert band. He could step into a serious club and be hailed and dragged onstage by any good band. Even back when, in Georgia at age seventeen, he was more than accomplished on both slide and valve. He favored the copper and silver Bachs. He’d come out of Athens roaring, skipping his high school senior year because he was such a prodigy. Edgar had then got the ear of a jazz fanatic on the university faculty who contracted for his audition in Nashville with Peets Lambert’s old big band. It was turning electric and throwing out, ruthlessly, the old players. Lambert had a new sound—jazz/swing, jazz/reggae, jazz/classic, jazz/blues, jazz/country, even. This was simply desperation to survive. The band had not recorded in seven years. Now even the manager was only twenty.

  Lambert, a disguised sixty-six, had not made enough to be comfortable from constant tours. He was wearing down, had emphysema, and it was hoped the new Lambert Big Thunder Hounds would get hip and record again. Edgar was approved immediately. He found himself in Chicago with two suitcases, two horns, and ten thousand dollars from Lambert. The band members came from everywhere and almost all were near-adolescent. Edgar loved them. He’d been on the horn so thoroughly since age ten that he’d never been to a scout or church camp or had even played in a high school band, having bypassed them for the Atlanta Symphony at age fourteen. So this was a grand society for him. He loved it, lived it, inhaled it. Immediately he began cigarettes—what the heck?—and staying out late with the guys: hipsters from Los Angeles, nerds from Juilliard, a gal bassist from Jackson, Mississippi—his crush—who hardly spoke except relentlessly and in exquisite taste with her Ampeg fretless. Edgar was in love from their first meeting. He too was shy and awkward, except on his horn, and it took him a year to ask her out, though he watched her religiously during his breaks—how she stood, short and blonde, but somehow with long, heartbreaking legs in black hose as she called on her strings to provide the hard bottom gut of the band. When they did record, did make money, back down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he listened and was caused to tremble by the wanton bass authority that poured from the modest, yes, woman. “All woman,” he repeated to himself.

  Lambert threatened to throw them out if they took drugs or even drank much. The parents at home loved that about Lambert. He’d returned in fame from a beloved, almost persecuted era in music, and seemed a practical saint to them, a saint of cool when he appeared on television in a turtleneck with his still thick salt-and-pepper hair, beret, and those long genius piano fingers, announcing against drugs nationally. He was one of the first celebrities to do it in the seventies. A victim of cigarettes, he gently pled for the young to avoid his error, though everybody noticed the good man lighting one up in the wings or bathroom every now and then. He looked guilty, though, and nobody said a word. Edgar, with no prior use or education in drugs at all, learned something alarming: Parton Peavey, the black boy on guitar, came into the band daily on heroin and never stopped in the years that Edgar knew him. (He was a fabulous crowd-pleaser in a herd of twenty-six crowd-pleasers—flat-out celestial on an old Fender clawed to pieces, maybe dug out of a burned-down nightclub in the Mississippi Delta, the great bad taste of the fifties left in its remaining blue—Parton Peavey was a star and everybody knew it.) Parton was from east Texas, like the Winters, Stevie Ray and, later, Robert Cray. He would vacation in Beaumont once a month and return with a literal bag of heroin (China White in a one-pound burlap sugar bag). Edgar, drop-jawed, saw him fix himself in a Milwaukee hotel room, calm as putting on a Band-Aid. Didn’t he know Lambert would can him instantly? The band was heaven come real to Edgar and he couldn’t understand why Parton would do this. But Parton didn’t care, it seemed. He played brilliantly, though, and gigged out far more than any of them. The truth was that he was close on being a celebrity at his rail-thin age of twenty-one.

  He was so good, or so wanted (guitars owned the world), the suspicion was Peets Lambert couldn’t get rid of him, even if he did know. When he let out, peerless amid the stage-packed Big Thunder Hounds, it was a sound such as not heard any where. Maybe he was addicted to that, too. Come another year he could fire Lambert and buy the band himself. He already had four records. Really, after three years and all that money, it was a miracle he remained with the band at all. He was an imitation of nobody, seemed unconscious of anybody before him, and had his own cult. All this with heroin. Edgar constantly expected him to fall over or go raving, taken off by ambulances and the police, but Parton didn’t.

  Parton was docile, not sullen or conceited, uneasy with women, and in ways more boyish than Edgar. He was not stupid, but he didn’t know one state capital, and when they were headed to a city, he’d only ask, “Up North? Down South?” He seemed barely to have known an ocean, though Beaumont was on the Gulf of Mexico itself. The Pacific off Los Angeles–Venice rather frightened him. He believed, Edgar figured, that the United States didn’t end, ever. There was a lot in the world most of them didn’t know, some of them near-infantile despite their prodigy, but Peavey took the ticket. Even during his molelike existence in Athens, Edgar had never approached this insulation, practicing upward of twelve hours a day. The thing was, this made Parton Peavey likable, in a strangely hip way, and he began a fad of willful ignorance in the band. People would claim they knew nothing, had never heard of spearmint gum or a pocket calculator. He and Peavey became good friends. Everybody wanted to be close to him. There was a good, young quiet warmth about him, an endless politeness, too. And he was shot full of the world’s worst bad, all the time.

  The band rose. Edgar had two cars—a Volvo coupe in Chicago and an old vintage Caddy convertible back home in Athens where he got the GED one idle summer at his parents’ insistence. He was a minor star down there. Nobody cared much for the trombone, but they respected him as an eccentric phenomenon, and the local paper kept up with him. He affected, newly, an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a pet weasel that clung to his neck when he dashed around Chicago and Athens. Edgar had a plain, narrow, long-nosed face. He let his hair grow down to midback, sometimes braiding it twice. He had the necessary headband—chartreuse—and he had a tattoo of an upside-down American flag right at the bottom of his throat where a tie-knot would have been. (His parents gasped when they saw it and he did, too, thirteen years later.) Edgar had always felt behind on his personality. It was near the end of the Vietnam War, so he had to get in fast on his outrage, and a bit louder. He’d gotten tattooed, sober, by the best in a New Orleans parlor, although the old mulatto was an ex-marine and hated the job—“Strictly for money, boy, you got the American right, you got the American right. Play your horn and sport while they dies for you.” Somebody gave Edgar books by Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Hemingway and Burroughs; also the poetry of Anne Sexton, which he liked especially and reread. He was coming on strongly to the bass-playing woman, Snooky, and barely knew that he was capturing her with his new vocabulary stolen from Ms. Sexton. With her and the others his library stopped. He could not conceive needing anything else, ever.

  Edgar could afford to get a sitter for his apartment in Chicago, a jazz-smitten female student at the University of Chicago who was just a friend. She took care of his weasel, his Harley and Volvo, his books, his stereo equipment, and his collection of trombone recordings, which dated from the twenties on. Living the trombone had paid off in spades. He could buy and sell most college graduates his age. He had the leisure—holy smoke, he was playing
all the time already—to take Caribbean vacations, playing trombone with West Indian steel bands (what a sound!) and drummers in Rio (salsa, salsa). The girl, from Louisiana, would boil crawfish for him on his return. He pretended to like them, but it was really Parton they delighted, by the potful, his chin shining with juice. What wonderful friends Edgar had then! Paradise, and Snooky slowly falling in love with him. She had a wild side, of course, especially liking midnight and later on the Harley, whipping around Lake Michigan on the back, hands under his armpits, in a dress with a bare twat underneath, her legs spread, the wind slipping around her joyful “womanity,” she said, confessing shyly to him after several rides. That, and the fact she was quietly but increasingly jealous of his house sitter, sitting closer to him and nailing down his thigh with her little hand, were the signals she was going for him in a long way, Edgar thought.

  The band went by chartered plane. Snooky was flirted with by everybody, even Parton, but inevitably she’d sit by Edgar, trembling, and he would nurse her fear of flying. Her outfits became sexier and more garish as she was brought out front more and more to riot the house. It was a beloved thing to him that she remained shy and girlish as she aged. They were growing up together, a very privileged American jazz adolescence. In a way, though, to the crowd, Peets Lambert was her pimp. He went wow and stroked his chin at the piano when she came out nearly nude in her brief gaudy dress and stiletto heels, hamming with the happy lech smashed by her naughty rig, avuncular (old Peets had seen the wimmens in his time!). The public loved it, the Hollywood Bowl howled. Could it get any better? They did nine encores one night. Edgar played so well some nights that he knew he’d lucked into another whole planet of jazz, just a few of the greats nodding wisely around him. Somebody told Edgar that jazz was the only original American art form. He felt safe in history then.